I Was Moved and You Will Be, Too

A view of "We Shall Not Be Moved" is a must. Contact the Concerned Citizens of Tillery office for information on how to purchase a copy of it. It needs to be in our offices, used in our classrooms, and made available to our students and friends. You can find the link to CCT's web page at the lower right of this column.

I was struck once more their commitment to the land, and how despite slavery, post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, and other damaging influences, African Americans were able to secure land and make a living off the land. Time and time again in my travels through the south and mid-west, adult children of African American farmers insisted that they were able to attend college and get decent jobs as a result of the successes of their parents on the land. The land wasn't given to them. They had to earn it. The resettlement community along the Roanoke River in North Carolina was only one of several around the country. There was one here in Texas, in Sabine County, and I plan to look into that effort and see how it worked.

Also rather striking were the larger issues of the plantation world, first the literal plantation and the owners and the owned, and then came the system of share cropping, simply put, another version of the owners and the owned. Undoubtedly, there were decent and ethical land owners who honestly worked on the halves with their tenants. On the other hand, unless a Black farmer could do math well, and understood the value of 3 cents here and there, the landowner, in cahoots with the owner of the store that sold seed, fertilizer, food, and other important commodities, took advantage of the farmers. At the end of the year when things got all settled, they were at best balanced, and at worst the Black farmer was left in the economic hole and had to work another year for "the man" only to discover that the year turned into years. The only way to escape it was to sneak out in the middle of the night, take the family, and go in hopes of finding a more honest landowner. There were few if any advantages to the Black worker on the man's land.

In "We Shall Not Be Moved," an effort on behalf of the "New Deal" administration is described that was implemented to put farmers on the land that they owned, to remove the onerous burden of the tenant farming, sharecropping system. Sometimes racism crept in such as following the flood of 1940 and later other nefarious means of taking land away, some of which continue to this day. This effort, though, helped African Americans, and whites as well, to get on the land, and to make a living on the land.

They were successful at their chosen vocation. Listen to the stories. See it in their faces. These were a resilient people who faced a variety of struggles, and who came to be successful in living off the land. A community was built that instilled values of faith, hope, family, and togetherness in the lives of people. Families helping families build buildings or slaughter hogs, or harvest the crops. They educated their children and gave hope to the next generation.

On a personal level, it was moving to see familiar faces and to hear familiar stories and to see familiar names on the screen and in the printed materials that accompanied the documentary. I also found it extremely moving to listen to "Wade in the Water," the CD of gospel music that provides the background music for the documentary.

Does this come across as advertising? Perhaps. Hopefully, though, it's simply one person's way of saying, "Hey! Watch this documentary. Listen to this music. You'll be moved by the folks who refused to be moved."